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[Brentai]

Whether we give two shits if Bill Maher* tumbles off the air or not really depends on whether you believe they really have an ugly influence over the establishment, or they simply bring the ugliness in the establishment to public consciousness.  In the former case, yes, they should all fag off and let political discourse stay between politicans and not between politicans and shock jocks.  In the latter case, they absolutely need to keep doing what they're doing, and let the angry (and often profitable) reactions roll in and take effect.

Reality always has to do this complicated thing where the answer is really "both" of course, in which case our ideal situation is one in which the pundits are both dead and not dead.  Of course any armchair physicist will happily tell you that the easy way to accomplish that is simply not to observe them.

In all seriousness though, I can't believe we've gotten to this point and nobody's taken a step back and looked at the problem here.  Hell, the GOP elite's even pointed right the fuck at the elephant in the living room and they still can't tell it's there.

The elephant is that, when Rush Limbaugh calls somebody a slut, John Boehner has to get up on the podium and make a public apology, and when Bill Maher calls somebody a fat sopping worm-eaten vagina with AIDS that deserves to die and burn in hell for infinite eternities, Barack Obama does not give even a thimbleful of santorum.  Because he is the President of the United States of America and Bill Maher is a guy on HBO.

Rush Limbaugh isn't even a guy on HBO!  He only gets listened to at all because not every car in America is equipped with an MP3 player yet!

So you have to ask yourself how one party has managed to get to this point, where the ranting of a ratings whore over a somewhat antiquated medium has the power to actually force the Speaker of the House to come out and try and avoid embarrassment.  This is where the GOP has gone wrong.  The rest is just fluff and aftereffects.

I'll let you in on a little secret.

I'm actually pretty conservative.

That's why I follow the party that doesn't seem to be taking all of its moral guidance from a disk jockey.


* Or whatever fucking cunt has called somebody a cunt today.

[Sharkey]

I'll let you in on a little secret.

I'm actually pretty conservative.

[Mongrel]

I'm conservative as fuck, but never in my life have I been offered a decent Conservative Party candidate to vote for. I have never in fact VOTED for a Conservative candidate.

But in Canada there's a little secret too: Both our major parties are actually conservative.

[Thad]

I was complaining about "conservative" and "liberal" in American politics having nothing to do with their actual traditional definitions before I ever cracked an Orwell book.  The false notion that there's a huge gulf between "the right" and "the left" is how they manage to cling to power.  (In reality, they're more like "the right" and "the center-right", with a few center-left in there and I guess Bernie Sanders off to the actual left somewhere.  Inasmuch as a single axis can accurately reflect the complexity of political thought, which...well, it can't in real life but it's probably pretty close as far as American electoral politics are concerned, more's the pity.)

My favorite linguistic example of how fucked our political language has become is that the people we call "conservatives" are generally the people who are opposed to conservation.  Never mind that things like wars of choice and eliminating all federal government funding for anything except wars of choice are pretty fucking radical ideas and not traditionally conservative in the least.

But yes, to the point of the fundamental difference between Limbaugh and Maher: you've nailed it.  Democrats are not afraid of Bill Maher.  I don't think it's quite accurate to say that Rush is running the Republican Party or that it's taking its cues from him (though you could easily make that argument for, say, Norquist), but he DOES have the power to seriously fucking inconvenience any Republican who criticizes him.

This is part of the same usual stuff we gripe about, I think: the liberal base is less monolithic, and votes in smaller numbers, than the conservative (granting our caveats about how fucking inappropriate those words actually are).  Fewer people listen to Bill Maher than Rush Limbaugh, and of those not that damn many are going to vote based on what Bill Maher says.  (And indeed even Bill Maher's fans probably have an easier time criticizing him than Rush's fans have criticizing him.  I liked Religulous and I like a lot of what Maher has to say, I think he usually has pretty good guests and often has good debate topics.  But I also think the guy's an ass, and a misogynist besides, and that that's why he's backing Rush up in this case, because the one topic that unites the two of them is that they both like saying terrible things about women.)

(Also, Maher's fans KNOW he's a comedian.)

[Mongrel]

I was complaining about "conservative" and "liberal" in American politics having nothing to do with their actual traditional definitions before I ever cracked an Orwell book.  The false notion that there's a huge gulf between "the right" and "the left" is how they manage to cling to power.

Basically, yeah. You'll note that the capitalization in my previous post was very deliberate.

[Brentai]

So the new Democratic strategy is to feed the GOP a bunch of poison pills that really aren't very poisonous at all.  I never like naked politicking - and whether you support the Violence Against Women Act (a poorly thought out title from several angles) or not, you have to agree that, given the nation's current priorities, this is naked politicking - but there's something completely wrong with the GOP ideology that the Dems were ever allowed to do this in the first place.

Here's how broken the GOP agenda is:

The conservative base protests the law on two main grounds: that it allows immigrant victims of domestic abuse to obtain temporary visas so that they can claim protection and legal action against their spouses and partners, and it allows homosexuals to claim protection and legal action against their spouses and partners.

What these two groups have in common is that they all, presumably, have foreign and/or homosexual spouses or partners who are verbally, physically or sexually assaulting them on a regular basis.

So... so you don't want to maybe take care of that?

Because the thing about these violent, sadistic, and probably perverted ferr-in and fagg-it people is that they're in your country, interacting with your wo/mans.  Actually, provably violent immigrants and homosexuals are wandering around out there, working your jobs, talking to your children, and looking over your fine ass every day. 

Isn't that why you hate these minorities so much?  Because they're criminal and scary?  Why don't you want to back a law that puts pressure on the criminal and scary ones?

Is your ideology so fucking warped at this point that you will risk your political career to protect the most evil members of certain groups, just to punish the innocent ones?

Did it ever occur to you that an battered immigrant may wish to return immediately to his or her own country, or that the only thing keeping a homosexual in a relationship you despise so much is fear?

No?  Okay then.

I guess there's nothing left to say other than see you in November.  Oh, and don't be too upset if Enrique ever corners you at knifepoint and demands you bend over.  I guarantee you had his vote.

[Büge]

http://www.esquire.com/features/young-people-in-the-recession-0412

Hey, thanks a lot, old people!

[Mongrel]

Thirty years in the making, this shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone. 

Could be worse though. We could be Europeans.

[Classic]

I found the infographics offensive.
It tries, and succeeds, at making the case that young people today are in fact propping up older people and that the kinds of opportunities once available to fresh baby boomers doesn't exist for new entrants to the workforce.
What it doesn't try to do, and therefore doesn't quite succeed, is explain that this isn't just a matter of the young failing to "pay their dues" as entrance to "the good life". It did satisfactorily rebut every other old person's complaint about young people. Not related to their rock and rolls or pokeymans.

[Brentai]

Kind of amusing timing, what with the GOP House passing a Medicare  "reform" that basically boils down to "give everyone under 55 a chance to get the fuck out of the program while the getting's good".

[Büge]

http://www.wmctv.com/story/17353757/bill-would-define-holding-hands-kissing-as-gateway-sexual-activity

OH COME ON

[Doom]

THE SOUTH, Y'ALL

[Shinra]

look, the only time a boy should hold the hands of a girl is to help her get a lynch around a negro's neck

[Mongrel]

So basically the idea is to work towards a point where the only permitted form of intercourse in The South is rape?

[Disposable Ninja]

Squealing like a pig is how you say 'Hello' south of the Mason Dixon.

[JDigital]

But guys will still be able to LOOK at girls. How about we make them wear some kind of face-covering veil?

[Büge]

How to win a culture war and lose a generation

(Pre-Thad Edit: It's an article about how the Christian Church is hemorrhaging twenty/thirtysomethings in order to maintain an anti-LGBT position)

[Royal☭]

http://www.esquire.com/features/young-people-in-the-recession-0412

Hey, thanks a lot, old people!

Wanted to take a moment to pick up on this piece, because it's pretty much just trying to get young people to support austerity. The crux of the article is not "Look how good the old have it, let's all aspire to that", it's "Look how good the old have it, let's tear that motherfucker down", which is a shitty thing to do.

Try not to get sucked into the politics of envy. It's possible for us to all have it nice, and blaming septuagenarians with pensions won't get us anyway. And really, which seems like they're a greater strain on the economy: 70-year-olds picking up $700 checks each month that they paid into their whole lives, or the 400 or so guys each hoarding over a billion dollars that they hire cops to keep away from the rest of us?

[Thad]

...I think you quoted the wrong post there.

[Royal☭]

I did indeed. I'm going to blame Buge for just posting a link and single line comment, twice.